GNOME 1.0

March 3, 1999

SAN JOSE, CA - The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the
release of GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) 1.0 today at
the Linux World Conference. GNOME is an integrated desktop environment
designed to run on GNU/Linux systems.

The Free Software Foundation, a tax-exempt charity formed in 1985, is
dedicated to eliminating restrictions of people's right to use, copy,
modify, and redistribute computer programs. It does so by protecting
these rights through the GNU General Public License. The aim is to
give people the freedom to cooperate with other computer users.

"GNOME is a flexible GUI (Graphical User's Interface) that combines
ease of use and the flexibility and reliability of GNU/Linux. We're
very excited about GNOME and what it will mean for the future of
GNU/Linux computing" Miguel de Icaza, chief designer of GNOME said
earlier.

de Icaza, along with 250 other programmers around the world - most of
them volunteers for FSF, have been working on GNOME for almost two
years now. They have received additional help from Red Hat Software
Inc's RHAD (Red Hat Advanced Development) labs. "The Free Software
Movement is a very dynamic one. GNOME is not only providing a desktop
for end-users: it is laying down a foundation for standardizing a
number of issues that have been ignored for a long time by the Unix
community." de Icaza said.

GNOME has features that will allow a user to assign an icon to a file
or URL. It has a drag and drop enabled desktop, making use of the
standard Xdnd and Motif protocols for maximum interoperability. It
has been coded to make it easy for international users, with core
components currently supporting more than 17 languages, with more on
the way. It works well with other scripting and compiling languages,
including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, TOM, Perl, Guile, etc.

"GNOME is a giant step towards achieving the Free Software
Foundation's goals of providing a whole spectrum of software for
everyone from experts to end-users. We're excited about the
direction that GNOME will take us in." Richard Stallman, Founder and
President of the Free Software Foundation said. " 'Free Software' is
a matter of liberty not price. It includes the freedom to run, copy,
distribute, study, change and improve any software distributed under
the FSF's General Public License. We hope that this will continue to
create a vigorous environment for programmers and users to create and
use GNU/Linux and GNOME programs. Very soon we'll see a wide range of
GNOME-based applications, to answer the different needs of computer
users."

RHAD Labs was established as an independent development group to work
on the usability of the GNU/Linux operating system. RHAD Labs'
charter is to work with the free software development community to
develop a highly accessible graphical computer environment on
GNU/Linux.

GNOME is available for free download at http://www.gnu.org,
http://www.gnome.org and several other mirror sites. It will also be
included in Red Hat Software, Inc.'s GNU/Linux distributions with
other sources available later in the year.

CONTACT: Timothy Ney, The Free Software Foundation - (617)542-5942

Biographies

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, launched in 1984
to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for Gnu's Not
Unix), to thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them
have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and
redistribute it, as well as make changes, either large or small.

Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, a
portable optimizing compiler that was designed to support diverse
architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over
30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also
wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), Gnu Emacs and various other GNU
programs.

Stallman received the Grace Hopper award from the Association for
Computing Machinery in 1991, for his development of the first Emacs
editor in the 1970's. In 1990, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation
fellowship, and in 1996, an honorary doctorate from the Royal
Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, along with Linus Torvalds.

Miguel de Icaza, 26, was born in Mexico City, Mexico. He studied
math at the Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico. He started
writing free software in 1994 and has been working on the GNOME
project since 1997. He currently works as a Systems Administrator for
the Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico.

Timothy Ney is an officer of the Free Software Foundation and
manages the organization's administration and distribution activities
in Boston. He has an extensive background in media, on-line business
and non-profit management. Mr. Ney was the Executive Director of the
Independent Feature Project in New York, where he advised independent
filmmakers on the financing and distribution of features films and
documentaries and coordinated market research with the Sundance
Institute. As Director of Business Development for Baseline in Los
Angeles, he launched the on-line service for the entertainment
industry into Europe and Japan. He was attracted to free software by
the same passion he found in artists and filmmakers.

Michael Fulbright ("Dr. Mike") is currently the director of RHAD
Labs (Red Hat Advanced Development) at Red Hat Software, Inc., and was
one of its founding members. Michael did early work organizing and
maintaining the GNOME web and ftp sites, as well as organizing GNOME
releases with other GNOME project leaders. He is a North Carolina
native who has been using computers since his youth in the late 70's.
He received a B.S. in Physics at North Carolina State University and a
Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Arizona. After using
GNU/Linux for several years while a graduate student, Michael fell in
love and switched his career so he could spend full-time working on
Free Software and GNU/Linux. He is happily married to his wife Lysa.
They live not far from his childhood neighborhood, where he first
learned to program.